At present, in the development of digital technology, digital cameras and digital video cameras capable of performing high resolution digital moving image capturing have been widely spread. In addition to the implementation of the high resolution digital moving picture, user's demands for extracting a user's preferential frame from the captured moving picture and printing the frame as a still image has also been increased simultaneously. The process of extracting the frame from the moving picture and printing the frame is called “moving picture frame printing” according to the present invention.
The digital moving image is generally compressed (encoded) to efficiently record the digital moving image in a recording medium represented by a flash memory, and H.264/MPEG-4AVC (hereinafter, referred to as H.264) has been widely used as the moving image encoding method. (ITU-T H.264 (03/2010) Advanced video coding for generic audio visual services)
The processing order of the macroblock in H.264 is illustrated in FIGS. 19A and 19B. As illustrated in FIG. 19A, one frame is divided in a unit of a macroblock configured with (16 pixels)×(16 pixels), and the encoding process is performed. The encoding is performed in the order of the upper left macroblock, the upper right macroblock, the lower left macroblock, and the lower right macroblock in the frame. In the decoding process, the decoding is performed in the same processing order as that of the encoding process, and the decoded image is output.
In addition, a multi-slice structure where one frame is divided into a plurality of slices is employed to improve error tolerance or the like in H.264. The slice is configured with one or more macroblocks. FIG. 19B illustrates the multi-slice structure, the order of encoding, and the order of decoding.
Recently, the international standardization of more efficient encoding methods as a successor of H.264 has been started, and Joint Collaborative Team on Video Coding (JCT-VC) is established between ISO/IEC and ITU-T. In the JCT-VC, standardization of the encoding method of High Efficiency Video Coding (hereinafter, referred to as HEVC) has been advanced.
In the standardization of HEVC, various encoding methods are widely studied in terms of improvement of the encoding efficiency, easiness of the mounting, and reduction of the processing time. Among them, there is a method called Tile which enables parallel processing of encoding and decoding. (Contributed to JCT-VC, JCTVC-F335.doc Internet<http://phenix.int-evry.fr/jct/doc_end_user/documents/6_Torino/wg11/>) If the Tile is used, due to the parallel processing of the encoding and the decoding, it is possible to implement a high speed process and to reduce the memory capacity of the encoding apparatus and the decoding apparatus.
In general, similar to full high vision of (horizontal 1920 pixels)×(vertical 1080 pixels), a longitudinally-wide frame is used for digital moving picture. On the other hand, in the use case of the moving picture frame printing, mainly due to apparatus limitation of a main body of a printer, the printing of the longitudinally-wide frame is generally performed in the horizontal direction (in the direction from the pixel column of the left end to the right end) in a unit of a vertical pixel column of the frame.
FIG. 20 illustrates a processing order of image output for the decoding and the printing process in the moving picture frame printing. FIG. 20 illustrates a frame configured with p macroblocks in the horizontal direction and q macroblocks in the vertical direction. In FIG. 20, the numbers indicate space coordinates of each macroblock. As described above, the decoding process in the H.264 is performed in the raster scan order in a unit of a macroblock.
In FIG. 20, the process is performed in the order of (0, 0)→(0, 1)→(0, 2)→ . . . →(0, p−1)→(1, 0)→(1, 1)→ . . . →(1, p−1)→(2, 0)→ . . . →(q−1, 0)→ . . . →(q−1, p−1).
On the other hand, in the printing process of the moving picture frame printing, the left-end macroblock column of (0, 0) to (q−1, 0) is a firstly needed area. Next, the macroblock columns of (0, 1) to (q−1, 1) and (0, 2) to (q−1, 2) are sequentially needed. The order is different from the processing order of the decoding.